True enough, it's cheaper to buy a hard drive. But what absolutely amazes me is that so many people who opt for this sort of solution locate the backup hard drive either in the same box(!) or in another machine in the same room. A powerline surge, a fire, or a flood will take out the original as well as the backup. So much better to do your storage thousands of miles away, on a commercial system that no doubt backs up your stuff up on more than one server.

"it's cheaper to buy a hard drive. But what absolutely amazes me is that so many people who opt for this sort of solution locate the backup hard drive either in the same box(!) or in another machine in the same room. A powerline surge, a fire, or a flood will take out the original as well as the backup. So much better to do your storage thousands of miles away, on a commercial system that no doubt backs up your stuff up on more than one server."

Garry, I would prefer cloud storage than personal hard disk because of convenience. I can access my data at anytime from anywhere; irrespective of location or time without carrying the hard disk.

I prefer both, Gigi3. There's no guarantee that a cloud provider can't ever lose data. For the relatively low cost and minimal extra effort, use a service and offline drives that is stored someone other than the same room/house. To me, it is worth a few extra steps to double-down on protecting my critical data.

"There's no guarantee that a cloud provider can't ever lose data. For the relatively low cost and minimal extra effort, use a service and offline drives that is stored someone other than the same room/house. To me, it is worth a few extra steps to double-down on protecting my critical data."

"The price (10$ - 10T) per month for a small size company is very good but for a regular user still is not that cheap as it sounds. Maybe a scale in GB will be more beneficial for everybody. "

Nemos, cloud storage is dynamic and it's good for a short period; who don't want to invest in infrastructure. In long term it's always better to have own storage place because it's economic and secure.

Personally, I have never used Dropbox (or any of its competitiors) for backup given that a 1 TB external HDD from Toshiba can be had for under $50.00. Dropbox is good for sending large files exceeding 25 MB but that's about it. Actually, YouSendIt is a lot more secure for sending large files.

@asksqn> Dropbox itself doesn't do much, but there are a good number of other programs and plugins out there that use Dropbox in a very convenient fashion. One that comes immediately to mind are the WordPress plugins that backup your WP site dirct to DropBox. It's a quick and easy public HTTP server - I use it as a source for Minecraft texture plugins (used for server-textures). I guess if you can find the right use for it, it's gold; if you can't, it's just another stupid bit of cloud storage :)

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